Thursday, August 24, 2017

Actor Bruce Campbell offers an engaging master class in schlock

“Frankly, I can never be far enough from Hollywood,” wrote lantern-jawed Bruce Campbell in his 2001 memoir “If Chins Could Kill.”

Now, in this variety pack of “further confessions” titled “Hail to the Chin,” the self-styled “B movie actor” recounts trading smog-clogged L.A. for a lavender-carpeted hillside in southern Oregon, then shooting films and TV series in Bulgaria, Colombia, New Zealand and his native Michigan.

“I’ve been called a ham actor,” Campbell says with felony-level understatement. He loves to wink at the camera, and in the course of playing characters as diverse as Elvis, Reagan and Santa Claus, he has chewed up more scenery than Godzilla and Rodan combined. (Sometimes literally: His character in the “Evil Dead” horror franchise, which made Campbell a cult icon in the 1980s, sports a chain saw as a prosthetic hand.)